I turned.
There stood Seliora, beside a taller, red-haired woman. This time Seliora was wearing a rich green skirt with a black blouse and a matching green jacket. She smiled at me.
“Seliora.” I couldn’t help but smile back, especially after the coolness of Sagaryn and Rogaris.
She took another step toward me, and another, stopping almost close enough that I could have reached out to embrace her. I thought about it, but didn’t.
“I’m glad to see you,” she began, her words warm. “You just disappeared, and no one heard anything. I heard that you couldn’t find a position. I worried about you.”
I was glad someone worried, but I didn’t want to say that. “I couldn’t leave Imagisle for quite some time,” I explained, adding, “You know that’s where I went?”
“I can see that. The gray looks good on you. I thought . . .”
“You thought what?” I looked at her. “Foretelling?”
She flushed, but kept her eyes on me. “I saw you in gray a long time ago. I didn’t know what it meant. Sometimes . . . it’s like that.”
I didn’t want to press her, and my smile turned wry. “It was either become a wool merchant or try to become an imager.”
She tilted her head, and her eyes sparkled, almost impishly. “I couldn’t see you as a wool merchant. I think you weren’t meant to be one. Are you an imager yet?”
“If they accept you, you’re an imager right away. You’re just a very low imager who’s restricted to the isle until you learn more.”
“I don’t imagine you’ll stay lowly that long.”
“I’ve been advanced since I’ve been there.” I could say that much without being boastful.
“I’m not surprised.” She smiled, tentatively. “Will you come to the dance with me?”
“I’d be pleased to . . . if you don’t mind being escorted by an imager.”
“Rhenn . . .” She shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I went in to Lapinina to talk to Rogaris and Sagaryn, and they barely said a dozen words. Staela kept calling me ‘sir,’ as if I’d never been in her bistro, and I’ve been coming there for almost five years.”
“I’m not them.” She smiled once more.
“I’m very glad.”
“Oh . . . Rhenn . . .” She turned and gestured to the tall redhead. “This is my big cousin Odelia.”
“I’m pleased to meet you.” I inclined my head to Odelia. She was definitely tall, within a few digits of me, not heavy, but muscular. Was everyone in Seliora’s family muscular?
Odelia smiled back politely. “I’ve never met an imager.”
“Three months ago,” I replied, “neither had I.”
Seliora looked at me, and I offered her my arm. “Shall we proceed?”
“You sound so formal.”
“It comes with the gray.”
She giggled-a sound so totally false that I knew she was jesting-and I laughed.
“That’s much better.”
Odelia stepped up on my left. I would have offered my other arm, but that didn’t feel right, and she didn’t seem to mind as we made our way across the pavement to the Guild Hall. In the west Artiema was about to set. I wondered if were just coincidence, or if the silvered moon happened to be a patroness of Seliora or Odelia. But that too was silly.
The guard who stood inside the hall looked at my grays, and then at Seliora and Odelia, then resolutely turned his head.
“You see,” I murmured.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re with us, and we’re still guild members.”
“I paid my fees for the first half of the year,” I added with a smile. “Doesn’t that still make me a guild member?” I didn’t think Guildmaster Reayalt would agree, but he wasn’t anywhere around, and, besides, Seliora was quite correct. She could bring anyone she pleased, although there were usually few outsiders.
The musicians were getting ready to play, and Odelia nodded to Seliora and slipped away.
“Kolasyn is over there with his friends,” Seliora said, “but he won’t be long.”
“Odelia gets her way?”
“We all do.” She offered that charming but mischievous smile. “You’ll see.”
By “all” I assumed she meant all the women in her family, but that wasn’t something I was going to ask. Maybe meeting her again under Artiema wasn’t exactly a coincidence, although that was just a superstition.
The music started, and I placed my right hand gently on the small of her back and took her right hand in my left. We began to dance. Seliora was a far better dancer than I was, even though Father had insisted that I learn the basics-even providing a dancing maitre, Madame D’Reingel-my last year in grammaire.
When the musicians paused, so did we.
“You dance better now,” she observed.
“I don’t know why. I haven’t danced since the last time we were here.”
“Did you think of me?”
“Yes. More than a few times.” That was certainly true.
She offered a false pout. “You tell all the girls that.”
“Only you,” I replied, immediately wishing I hadn’t phrased it quite that way.
“You only lie to me?” She flashed the mischievous smile.
“No. You’re just the only one I thought of-except women I’m related to, like Mother and Khethila.”
“I don’t know as I’d like to be considered a sister.”
I just groaned. “I can’t say anything right, can I?”
“At least you recognize that.” This time she laughed, softly, but not cruelly.
The music started up again, and I decided that silence was the better part of valor. We swirled out into the double handful of couples dancing.
“You’re stronger, too,” she said, after I twirled and lifted her, then set her back on the floor.
“That’s part of the training,” I admitted.
“It suits you.”
“What have you been doing, besides designing and embroidering and needlepointing chair fabric designs?”
“We don’t do the needlepoint by hand. We have several looms, including a small jacquard loom, but I have to punch out the cards once I work out the design. I’m also the one who keeps it running. Father isn’t all that mechanically inclined.”
“How tight can you get the weave?”
She looked up at with another smile. “How tight do you want it?”
I almost flushed at her words. “I guess I recall more of wool than I thought, or enough for you to pull it right over my eyes.”
She squeezed my fingers, just slightly.
We danced and talked until the musicians stopped playing for the evening. Then, I let go of her hand, reluctantly, I realized.
“Do you think I could persuade you to come next month?” she murmured.
“You could. I have Samedi afternoons and nights and Solayi afternoons off.” I realized I didn’t want to wait a month to see her again. “I’ve heard there’s a new bistro called Felters . . .”
“It’s quite good, Kaelyn said. I haven’t been there.”
“Next Samedi?” After I asked, I realized I was supposed to go to my parents’ for their dinner, but I knew I’d far rather spend the evening with Seliora.
“I’d love to, but Father is taking us to see his sister.”
“The seventh, then?”
“I’d like that very much . . . .”
“At fifth glass at your place?”
“That would be good.” A twinkle in her eyes accompanied the next words. “My parents will expect to meet you.”
“I’d be pleased.” I wondered if they would be, though. I didn’t know if all Pharsi families were as accepting as Remaya’s family had been of Rousel.
I did end up spending silvers-on a hack to drive her and Odelia back to the large building on the corner of Hagahl Lane and Nordroad that was clearly home and business to her and her family, and then to take me back to the east side of the Bridge of Hopes.
I was still smiling when I walked into my quarters.
35
Law is necessary because, without it, no one willingly
reins in self-interest.
Throughout the day on Solayi, as I struggled through the pages of Jurisprudence, my thoughts kept drifting back to Samedi. Why had Sagaryn and Rogaris been so distant? We’d been friendly for years, and I certainly hadn’t changed that much. Yet they’d been edgy and uncomfortable, as if they were suddenly afraid. Was their reaction one of the reasons why Master Dichartyn had said that I needed to see L’Excelsis again? But . . . Master Dichartyn had said that I projected what I felt, and I’d only felt friendly to them. Did that mean that they were so afraid that it didn’t matter that I was friendly? Yet Seliora had seemed happy for me, and Odelia had been more than pleasant.